The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Parents, students frustrated by end of in-person schooling
Connecticut teachers, parents and students took distance learning two weeks at a time.
For a while, returning to school still seemed like a distant possibility. Maria Jukic, a middle school English teacher in Greenwich, said she coaxed her students to finish their work by saying she would grade it when school returned.
As of Tuesday, there is no school to return to, after Gov. Ned Lamont announced the rest of the year would be done at a distance.
“It’s going to be really hard,” Jukic said. “You have to keep kids engaged for the next five weeks, and they know now — they’re not coming back.”
Educators worry about keeping their students checked into school and try to stitch together their students’ partially severed networks of friends and trusted adults. Parents, some of whom are also teachers, worry about juggling work, care-giving and school for another month and a half.
And kids mourn graduating from kindergarten and high school, getting outside for field day and dressing up for prom.
“Holding out hope helped us keep kids connected,” said Erin Montague, a middle school guidance counselor in Greenwich. “There’s going to be a grieving process
for us: What’s in store for us? How do we help kids with rites of passage, and keep them authentic, and honor the connections they made with us?”
Dr. Melissa Whitson, a licensed clinical psychologist and University of New Haven professor, said she knew school would end this way, but now, it is definitive.
“It feels like now, we’re just grieving again,” she said.
A time for mourning
Aaron Martino, a senior at Notre Dame Catholic High School in Fairfield and captain of the hockey team, abruptly lost the end of hockey season on March 10. Now, he is losing the rest of his senior year.
“It’s disappointing, especially the way the winter season ended,” the Stratford teenager said. “At the same time, I think it’s necessary, when you look at all the numbers around the world.”
Amy Beldotti is the parent of two students at Stamford High School and one at Rippowam Middle School. One son, a senior, is struggling with losing senior prom and the unofficial “senior skip day.”
“There’s a lot of sadness and grief missing out on a lot of those things,” she said.
But Beldotti said many Stamford families are going through much tougher times.
“For other families, there are many more challenges,” said Beldotti, the associate superintendent of teaching and learning for Stamford Public Schools. “I know how good we have it.”
Bobby DiPalma, a freshman at Norwalk High School, still showers, eats breakfast and gets dressed to prepare for his virtual classes. Although he keeps to his routine, his demeanor has changed, his mother Michelle said.
“You see that he misses his friend and that’s hard,” she said. “It’s hard for all of us. It’s a new world.”
Coping with remote learning
Before the coronavirus, there were boundaries. Classrooms were for
school. Offices were for work. Home was for family time.
Overnight, home became where school, work and family time occur, and adults with children are teachers, employees and parents, all at once, Whitson said. Teachers and parents feel immense pressures to emulate work and school environments from their homes, the UNH professor said.
“There really is no respite,” she said.
Chaila Robinson, a Bridgeport mother of three, works from 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., comes home and helps her kids — Kyrie, a freshman, and Kaydin, a second grader — with school, while tending to 18-month-old Kailynn. She returns to work at 2 p.m. and then back home at 5 p.m. to make dinner.
“This (distant learning) flipped my life upside down,” Robinson said.
She and her kids spend five to six hours straight doing homework, while taking care of Kailynn. In the background, she has taught herself Common Core-style instruction.
“I had to research and study their lessons so it would make sense to me before I sat back down with them,” Robinson said.
Next door in Fairfield, Stacey Wood has three children, a kindergartner, a third grader and a sixth grader. While she is trying to teach other students, her older child works independently, but the two younger children “really need guidance to make this effective.”
It’s like “whack-a-mole,” she said. As soon she gets one child settled down, “another one pops up.”
Wood has the additional challenge of balancing helping her children and her work as a Stamford teacher. Part of the trouble has been getting up to speed on all the new software and educational platforms.
“The race to learn technology has been overwhelming,” she said.
Nijija-Ife Waters, of Hamden, is also balancing work and helping her son, Amadi, who has a processing disorder and receives one-to-one assistance from a paraprofessional at his school in New Haven.
Waters said she cannot manage her work caseload
from home while also helping her third-grader with school. On top of that, Amadi is being asked to do work that does not match his abilities, his mother said. He does not know how to type, but spends so much time typing that his fingers cramp, she said.
“These children do not have typing skills,” she said. “Can it be multiple choice? Let’s not make everything a question.”
In May, the district started giving individualized packets for New Haven students with special needs. Amadi’s first packet provided some relief, Waters said.
In neighboring East Haven, Thomas Montgomery said his classes at trade school are held on Google Meet and he answers questions on his phone.
“I feel like I’m still learning stuff, but it’s not as easy as it was at school,” the 14-year-old said. “It used to be all hands on and now it’s all on the computer.”
His mother, Nicole, said he works independently, but she has to be on top of his younger siblings: Collin, 12, and Bailey, 10.
“I appreciate the teachers,” she said. “They’re being really understanding, but ... it’s not working, at least in my home . ... The new stuff, it’s not taking hold.”
She said she cried when she found out school will not be back in session this spring.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the next several months, forget the kids,” their mother said.
When she is not helping with school, Nicole Montgomery is getting food.
“They’re hungry every 37 seconds,” she said. After breakfast at home, she runs to school to pick up the food being distributed by the school system. They eat a second breakfast, an early lunch, a mid-afternoon lunch, and dinner.
“They’re eating me out of house and home,” the mother of three said.
Damaging psychological impacts
And teachers say in this new world, they feel especially responsible for helping their students keep up their social-emotional wellbeing.
Jukic said she checks in with her English classes through videoconferencing, and asks them if they have gone outside, or talked to their parents about anything interesting, or touched base with their friends.
“You’re the second parent,” the Greenwich teacher said. “Sometimes you have more pull than the parent.”
Jukic said her kids have shown a great deal of resilience and independence, and teachers luckily had six months in the classroom to establish a rapport with each child.
“That would have been even more chaotic than it is now,” she said.
Montague said she will drop everything, at any hour, to connect with a student, whenever one decides to reach out for counseling.
“We don’t want to let the opportunity to connect pass by,” the Greenwich guidance counselor said.
Administrators tell teachers take time to disconnect from work — but connecting with kids is what Montague signed up for.
“Every single student on my caseload and in our district has a different set of circumstances at home,” she said. “We can’t possibly begin to imagine where every student and family is coming from. We’re doing our best to maintain normalcy.” Students, especially those who saw school as their safe place and teachers as trusted adults, need to know she is an adult they can count on for constancy, she said.
The overnight closure of schools disturbed students’ worlds, said parent Sandhya Desmond, of Cheshire.
They could no longer see their friends, play on the playground or see their teachers for support.
But fostering a sense of community improves mental health outcomes, Whitson said. Even at a distance, families and institutions can make connections that increase the resilience of a community to the trauma of the coronavirus.
“When we feel helpless, things that are traumatic feel worse,” the UNH professor said.
On the flip side, writing messages, donating money, making masks and getting in touch can give people a sense of control and lessen the trauma of these situations, she said.
Schools are trying to do that, too.
Martino’s school is still finding ways to commemorate seniors. Instead of a senior video, all the students submitted clips for their commencement video and alumni are being honored, too, the Notre DameFairfield student said.
Beldotti, the Stamford associate superintendent, said keeping kids motivated and engaged for the last five weeks will be a challenge.
“We’re trying to figure out a nice way to close out the year that gives a feeling of real closure, while preparing for summer and the next year,” she said.
Closure can be something small, such as letting a student retrieve an abandoned sweatshirt or pencil case, or big, such as conducting graduation.
For Desmond, she is grateful for the time she can spend with her children, building connections with them and with their community in Cheshire.
While her husband still works 50-plus hours a week outside the house, she has been able to cook and bake with her children more and become more in-tune with their classes and their investments in school
The family made face shields for the medical community, with little notes inside each shield.
“We have taught our children to appreciate the little things, work together and further appreciate our medical professionals,” she said.